Roland Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’ is a seminal text on Semiology. It is a lucid, profound and insightful deconstruction of the manner in which Western society prostitutes itself through veils and constructions of signs, signals and symbols. Seemingly disparate subjects are discussed, from ‘Toys’, through ‘Striptease’ and ‘The Writer on Holiday’ to ‘The Great family of man.’

I have recently been working on a series of drawings, photographs and performances all of which take wrestling as their subject. Barthes discussion of this subject has articulated elements which drew me to wrestling, opened up realisations of its further potential and ultimately revealed its capability to be the ideal painterly subject.

“The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres.”

The debauched theatrics, ‘the spectacle of excess’, are the crux of wrestling’s initial appeal to the painter. The pomposity and bombastic nature of wrestling’s linguistics place it firmly under the stylistic, rather than historical, umbrella of the Baroque. It’s the timelessness of Wrestling which makes it such an a[appropriate symbol, freeing it of any firm roots in a particular historical or geographic location; from the ‘ancient theatres’ of Greece and Rome through to the theatre of a 12 inch flat screen in a sitting room off any generic street.

“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.”

It is the notion of Wrestling as a spectacle rather than a sport that appeals to me. Painting is surely the art of the spectacle. Wrestling sits on a strange crux between reality and theatre, blending and merging the barriers of truth and illusion. The dance and fluctuation between these two poles speaks of an art of deception. Is this not the exact arena in which painting exists?

The audience “abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees”

The description of wrestling as an art primarily of sensation over perception, a pathetic vision not a cerebral puzzle, is one which could equally be applied to painting. The role of the wrestler and the painting is to induce the abandonment to this debauched experienced ahead of the more civilised and socially prescribed path of intellectual reasoning. To release ourselves to this primeval desire it to tap into something more innate than the more coded and formal institutions of other art forms.

“The public knows very well the distinction between wrestling and boxing…A boxing match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time…wrestling is a sum of spectacle, of which no singleone is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result”

Thus wrestling belongs to painting, as art form which specialises in the celebration and eternalising of the moment in flux. Both are arts of the singular moment, celebrated for its intrinsic and independent worth, not due to its servitude to some wider system. Narrative as a linear progression, a temporal sequence of cause and effect, is the preserve of the fluid arts, literature and film in particular. Photography and painting hold sway on any activity whose strength is in the drama of each individual moment ahead of the sum of the parts. In both the moment is selected, spliced, then removed from context and embalmed.

When Barthes says:

“The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions”

He could have been talking about the viewer of a painter rather than that of a wrestling match. The interconnection of parts and the ‘logical conclusion’ of the narrative plot are not of interest to the fan of wrestling or painting.

Wrestling and painting are episodes, fragments which reveal themselves through gesture. The human comedy and tragedy of wrestling is unveiled in much the same way as that of painting. Both deal with melodrama, the ‘image of passion not passion itself’. Neither proposes truth, for both are theatre. More precisely, both are a pantomime.

The theatrics are freed from the constraints of truth. It’s the delight and excess of surface values, the reception of the spectacle as pure experience is all that matters. Any attempt to unveil meaning beneath the surface, to discover any truth is fruitless. Beneath the rich skin of both lays a vacuous cavern, a bankrupt system at best. We either find nothing or forms and meaning which collapse under scrutiny.

This is not a flaw but a blessing, a ritualistic purification, an emptying of the urn to celebrate form over content.

“The emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art”

The pantomime of wrestling and painting needs no consequence, no context or narrative decoration for its justification. Each moment is a performance in its one write, utterly autonomous.

“Each moment in wrestling is therefore like algebra, which instantaneously unveils the relationship between a cause and its represented effect”

It is the interrelation of the various gestures with in the snapshot moment from which the pantomime of painting and wrestling emerges, rather than unfolds. These gestures are pushed to their absolute limits, to find the most excessive form of eloquence possible. The result is the utter abolition, abandonment and annihilation of any reliance on the before or after. In some gestural decadence all pathetic references are squeezed into debauched instantaneity.

Wrestling displays to us a cornucopia of ‘Suffering’, ‘Defeat’ and ‘www.caJustice’. The suffering, amplified to the level of comic tragedy, is portrayed with the excess of a ‘primitive pieta’.

The aim of the fight is not victory, but the ‘Exhibition of Suffering’. Its display as tragic spectacle is what is central, not the cause or effect of the suffering in some wider plot. The gestures cause or confirm the suffering, are thus necessarily spectacular.

One such gesture is the hold. The hold is that which allows the wrestler to ‘immobilise the adversary indefinitely and to have him at ones mercy.’ It is therefore the ode by which one presents the opposition to the audience as a ‘spectacle of suffering’. The stillness of the hold is the power of its drama.

“The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions”

The spectators is not a sadist, we need have no enquiry into the morality of the enjoyment of viewing the hold.

“The spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of the iconography”

We marvel at the sheer eloquence of the articulation of suffering, the balance and harmony in the single web of cause and effect within one frame. The suffering is a by-product of the images power, not its actual value. Thus the actual magnitude or truth of the pain is not important, merely the poetry of its display. Thus the deception present in both painting and wrestling need not hinder our emotive response, for regardless of truth the image remains as complete.

Ending and defeat in wrestling are different to that in Judo.

“The ending of a judo-contest is abrupt, like the full stop which closes a demonstration.”

It is the inevitable outcome and final chapter of a series of events which have existed and happened to arrive at this point in time. All moments are subservient to a chronological hierarchy, with the whole system of parts existing as the dictatorial power which resides above all.

“The rhythm of wrestling is quite different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification: the emotional magniloquence, the repeated paroxysms, the exasperation of the retorts can only find their natural outcome in the most baroque confusion”

By Rhetorical amplification Barthes refers to the series of moments which oscillate next to each other, vibrating in the quest for resonance. Where meaning is sacrificed for the delight in the experience and consumption of each moment, none of which is subservient to the other, but each of which fed the other, serving up a banquette for a gluttonous audience. The phemonology of this pompous discourse is based in the sudden convulsing attack of repeated spasms, which arrive wave after wave. Our sheer exhaustion finds no outlet in a logical conclusion, but rather remains stuck in an eternal loop of gymnastic collapsing flesh. Any search for logic or reason is countered by a need to continue feasting on the spectacle, until drunk and swollen.

Wrestling, normally, presents us with two figures. It is in our nature to position these figures as oppositions. IN American wrestling they are normally either Heroes or Villains, symbols of good or bad. The reading of the opposition is a political or social one.

The French have a term which they apply to one of the wrestlers, ‘The Bastard’. The bastard is the figure who transgresses the rules without reason. They are an asocial figure. The formality and structures of the practise have been broken without any logical reasoning. The destruction of wrestling innate logic within each moment is the cause of the publics disdain for this figure. A figure that plays too fluidly wit the laws, happy to hid behind them when necessary but to break them when he wishes.

Yet the audience themselves, in their participation in the event, exist in deriving pleasure form an event which sits within but against the natural grain and morality of society. Yet the algebraic perfect of this existence provides its own internal justification. Without such iconographic purity any digression is deemed unworthy. The audience are thus offended and disgusted by the bastards actions.

“The inconsistency…sends the audience beside itself with rage: offended not in its morality but in its logic…the contradiction of arguments the basest of crimes. The forbidden move becomes dirty only when it destroys a quantative equilibrium and disturbs the rigorous reckoning of compensations; what is condemned by the audience is not the transgression of insipid official rules, it is the lack of revenge or punishment”

Is the misdemeanour is a logic action to find revenge or exert punishment, then it is justified. The search for such values sits higher in a hierarchy of reasoning than the artificial laws which are put in place to control wrestling, not to define it. It is an action which exists with an absence of such reasoning that the crowd condemns.

Punishing, therefore, is celebrated. Not for the suffering, and not solely as a root to justice or defeat. These are by products. But rather punishment is celebrated for its ‘mathematical justification’, in which a system of rules is justifiably broken. Punishment is the ‘verbal gesture of ultimate degradation.’

The true delight in wrestling, as in painting, exists in that…

… “Nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature”

It is this purity that delights us about both, that all we truly have is the moment, nothing outside or below the image. Such autonomy may sound Kantian, but it is not the denial of associations, but the refuting of any certainty in those associations. Thus we remained trapped in the image. Thus the intelligible nature of all exterior points of references, and reality itself, reveals itself to us.

Barthes decides that this presents wrestling as a metaphysical sign, and by proxy of this pieces analogy, painting as well. For…

…“What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of univocal nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction”

Such a leap may seem a paradox, arguing the sheer solipsistic nature of a subject to be the root cause of its metaphysical potential, but on such paradoxes painting exists. A closed door becomes an open window, for in shutting out the descriptive certainty of narration we reveal and present the poetic potential of experience as metaphor.

This process sees a mutation, painting and wrestling open themselves up as art forms capable of transmutation the boundaries of mere description. Able to reach rather than such boundaries as the inability to present them dissolves them. Freed of such a function new possibilities are revealed.

What Barthes presents us, therefore, in his discussion of Wrestling in ‘Mythologies’ is the possibility of wrestling as a perfect painterly subject. The excitement for a painter, however, comes not in such ‘philosophical’ delights, but in more puerile possibilities, the result of which could be the above.

It is the fact that images of wrestling present us with figures in a variety of positions and movements, allowing for the presentation and manipulation of figures and liens of various rhythms. Areas of descriptive form dancing through areas of uncertainty.

It is the existence of central characters on a stage which exists, a physical but non specific space, allowing us to present the drama in a realm which draws the viewer in, making the moment seem convincing, without tying it down to description or illustration. This is supported by the timelessness of the event, both historically and geographically.

It is the fact that wrestling presents images of theatre and excess spectacle that will delight any painter; the ability to find connection between paint, form, movement, emotion and flesh. The ‘repulsive quality of matter: the pallid collapse of dead flesh’ is something which wrestling presents and painting delights in.

It is these more prosaic delights which lead me to wish to deal with wrestlers. The potential for the previously discussed associations to emerge is a mere by product of this.